Most companies track all the right metrics for their AI rollouts. Licenses purchased. Tools deployed. Training sessions attended.
But they still can't answer the one question that matters most.
Is anything actually changing in how our people work?
These numbers look good in a board update. They tell you almost nothing about whether real behavior change is happening.
That gap, between deployment and real behavior change, is where most AI initiatives quietly die. No failed project. No big announcement. Just a slow drift back to the old way of doing things until one day someone asks how the rollout is going, and nobody has an answer.
I've watched this happen enough times that it drove me to get certified in change management in 2023. I was the only CEO in my cohort. What I learned changed how I think about everything we do at SoftSnow; and it's why we built something most AI implementations don't have.
Every client we work with receives a brief on a regular cadence. Not a status report. An action brief. There's a difference.
A status report tells you what happened. An action brief tells you what happened, what it means, and exactly what to do about it before the next one lands in your inbox.
This is the story of one week inside a real engagement, and what two pieces of data told a leader about his organization that he couldn't have figured out on his own.
The week in question
Mid-market manufacturing company. 80-plus employees. Five departments, all moving at different speeds through their AI journey. Eight months in.
The usage numbers came in for the week. The platform engagement was up significantly from the prior week, a new high-water mark. On the surface, it was a strong week. The kind of number that would show up green on any dashboard.
But inside that growth were two completely different stories. And each one required a completely different response from leadership.
Story one: the person nobody was talking about
A single person in the marketing department was responsible for a substantial amount of activity on the platform that week. On their own.
Someone had figured something out. They'd found real value in the tools and were going deep. And in eight months of working with this company, their name had never come up in a leadership conversation.
When a number like that surfaces in most organizations, nothing happens. It gets noted, the meeting moves on, and the person keeps doing what they're doing in relative invisibility.
That's a missed opportunity that costs more than most leaders realize.
We flagged it in the brief with a specific action item: recognize this person publicly, by name, that week. Not in an all-hands six weeks later. That week. A message from their manager. A mention in the team channel. Something visible to the people around them.
Why does timing matter so much?
Because recognition of AI engagement, when it happens fast and publicly, does two things simultaneously. It reinforces the behavior in the person being recognized. And it sends a signal to everyone watching that this kind of work is noticed and valued at the top of the organization.
That signal is one of the most powerful adoption drivers there is. It costs nothing. It takes five minutes. And most organizations never send it because they don't have visibility into who deserves it.
The leader sent the message that week. The following week, three other people in the same department meaningfully increased their usage. Nobody told them to. They just saw what got noticed.
Story two: the team that wasn't logging in
On the other side of the company, a newly licensed sales team had barely touched the platform. Low engagement across the board.
Easy to read as resistance. It wasn't.
When a new user gets a license and a login and nothing else, they freeze. A blank canvas is overwhelming. They don't know where to start, so they go back to what they know.
The problem isn't motivation. It's that they need a starting point.
The action item in the brief: the leader sends a short note to the sales team naming two specific tools to try first, matched to their actual role. One sentence on why each one matters to their day.
Not "here are all the things AI can do for you."
Here are the two things that will make your job easier this week. Start there.
That one communication - specific, relevant, from a leader they respect - shifts the entire dynamic. It takes a blank canvas and turns it into an on-ramp.
The leader sent it on a Tuesday. By the following week, that team's engagement had more than doubled.
What made the difference
Neither of those outcomes happened because the technology got better. The platform was the same on Friday as it was on Monday.
What changed was that a leader took two specific actions, with specific language, directed at specific people, in the same week the data showed they were needed.
That's active sponsorship. And it's the thing most AI rollouts are missing.
I wrote about the change management foundation behind all of this back in March 2025: The missing piece in AI conversations. This is the practical version of that: what it looks like when a leader actually has the information and the language to lead adoption week by week, instead of hoping it happens on its own.
The brief gives them both. The data tells them where to look. The action items tell them what to do about it. The leader just has to show up.
What your brief would show
Every organization has a power user nobody is recognizing and a team that needs an on-ramp nobody has built yet. Every single one.
The question is whether you have visibility into which is which, and whether your leaders know what to do when they find out.
If you're curious what this looks like for your company, just send me a message or email. I'm not going to send you a deck or book you into a demo. I want to hear what your team's AI adoption actually looks like right now.
That's usually where the most useful conversations start.
If you're ready to move from hoping adoption happens to actively leading it, let's get to work.
— Larry
